Writhing & Regret

This afternoon, as I was driving home from the swimming pool plus a morning of work at the medical school, I accidentally ran over a snake. On the road home, there is this sharp, sort of blind-curve bend in the road, where you have to slow to 20 mph (the rest of the road has a 25 to 35 mph speed limit). The bend is heavily shaded by a thick canopy of trees, b/c the neighborhood is wooded. (Plus, with all this rain we've been getting, it seems like everything has grown like wild this month--including many overgrown trees). Anyway, I wasn't even going that fast, either--maybe about 20-25 mph, but it was kind of dark and my reflexes were slow and I didn't really see the (quite long) black snake with white speckles slithering across the street until it was too late and my wheels were about to go over it (and they did and I felt a bump and thought, "oh shit").

I immediately slowed down and glanced in my rearview mirror. The snake had instinctively whipped into a large coil, and the driver in the light blue Ford Taurus behind me had come to a complete stop. But once I rounded the bend in the road, I couldn't see anything, and several seconds later, the blue car came following around the curve.

I do not like snakes, and yet, I feel really bad. I'd never deliberately hurt one! I hope it wasn't writhing in pain, and that it somehow managed to slither off of the road and into the grass to safety. Even though it's only a snake, and it was inadvertent, I feel like a big jerk for not seeing it soon enough to step on my brakes.

In other news: as I mentioned above, I'm now working in my new graduate assistant position (doing curriculum design) in the medical school. I started this week. I've only just started the job, but I think it's going to be really interesting and that I'll learn a lot. I think I'm going to like it.

Plenty is on my plate this summer, as I'm continuing to work my other (2nd) job in the med school as a data analyst/program evaluator. Though busy, I'm not complaining, as I'm getting paid at the med school. As for UNpaid work, there's stuff for school: I have what seems like endless revisions for a research article that I'm desperate to wrap up so it can be submitted to a journal for consideration for publication. This is the 3rd draft. Provided that it gets accepted for publication, the turnaround time between acceptance and the time it actually comes out in press is long--often a year or two. I will probably (hopefully!) have finished my dissertation and graduated by then.

And then there are comprehensive exams looming large on the horizon. Summer is already flying by. It's late June, and yet it's still raining. It's been raining almost every day since the beginning of May. April showers bring May showers, which bring June downpours. Apparently.